Online report of the Progressive Review. For 54 years, the news while there's still time to do something about it.

May 23, 2017

Can we admit that we've failed in the Mid East and start to move on?

Sam Smith - Regardless of our military strategy, regardless of how many laptops we ban from trans-Atlantic flights, regardless of how many Syrian refugees we keep out of the United States, our Mid East war is the longest and one of the most futile in our history.

There is really no mystery to this; we just don't talk about it. And the major media covers it as though the war was simply another scheduled sport event.

Many of the conflicts in the Middle East are rooted in particular tribal, ethnic, and religious factions who have found no way to resolve their problems through existing and often repressive regimes...

Western states have often played a role in these conflicts. For example, after WWI, national boundaries drawn by victorious Western powers cut through tribal, ethnic, and religious groups, and put different people together in a political system where one group's interests conflicted with those of other groups. After WWII, Western countries supported the establishment of a Jewish state that displaced Arabs who had lived in the area for many generations. The U.S. was involved in the overthrow of a popular government in Iran, and in the subsequent installation of the oppressive regime of the Shah. We can easily understand how America can be seen as the root of many problems experienced by the people of the Middle East.

We have, however, approached these problems not through negotiation, compromise, economic and social solutions, but overwhelmingly by military actions that have, in fact, failed. As Veterans for Peace asked, "What if we had used the $5 trillion we have spent on our wars in the
Middle East differently? How can we invest in a common future that
benefits everyone? How can we support the basic needs and dreams of
people in regions of conflict?"

Our refusal to even publicly discuss such questions and the media's failure to even mention them, is a sign that our policies are not only practical failures but reflect a serious collective mental problem. We left far more American bodies in Vietnam and Korea but we did eventually pull out. Now we continue to pursue a war of even lengthier failure, one for which no one can contrive a clear and arguable reason for its existence, and one in which public debate is virtually non-existent.

Our leaders in politics and the media will give us little help in this. As with Vietnam it will have to come from the streets.

US foreign policy is determined by oil pipelines and control over strategic resources. Citizen input at current minimal levels does not change that calculus. If it came down to oil pipelines versus citizen government the pipelines would win. Currently the high cost of martial law is avoided through propaganda controlling the partisan believers which ameliorates their cognitive dissonance. The plurality comprised of non-partisans is permanently sidelined with cognitive paralysis. To say that "we" as in we the people have a foreign policy, is a quaint throwback to an earlier era as removed from reality as the divine right of kings.

SAY IT AGAIN, SAM

ABOUT THE EDITOR

The Review is edited by Sam Smith, who covered Washington under nine presidents, has edited the Progressive Review and its predecessors since 1964, wrote four books, been published in five anthologies, helped to start six organizations (including the DC Humanities Council, the national Green Party and the DC Statehood Party), was a plaintiff in three successful class action suits, served as a Coast Guard officer, and played in jazz bands for four decades.

ABOUT THE REVIEW

Regularly ahead of the curve, the Review has opposed federal drug policy for nearly 50 years, was a lonely media voice against the massive freeways planned for Washington, was an early advocate of bikeways and light rail, and helped spur the creation of the DC Statehood Party and the national Green Party,

In November 1990 it devoted an entire issue to the ecologically sound city and how to develop it. The article was republished widely.

Even before Clinton's nomination we exposed Arkansas political scandals that would later become major issues. .

We reported on NSA monitoring of U.S. phone calls in the 1990s, years before it became a major media story.

In 2003 editor Sam Smith wrote an article for Harper's comprised entirely of falsehoods about Iraq by Bush administration officials.

The Review started a web edition in 1995 when there were only 27,000 web sites worldwide. Today there are over 170 million active sites.

In 1987 we ran an article on AIDS. It was the first year that more than 1,000 men died of the disease.

In the 1980s, Thomas S Martin predicted in the Review that "Yugoslavia will eventually break up" and that "a challenge to the centralized soviet state" would occur as a result of devolutionary trends. Both happened.

In the 1970s we published a first person account of a then illegal abortion.

In 1971 we published our first article in support of single payer universal health care